Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

While people are getting smashed by a cost-of-living crisis, Labor is proceeding with a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of stage 3 tax cuts for the top end and a grotesque $360 billion commitment to nuclear powered submarines. I want to issue a challenge to every single Labor Party senator in this place: go back to your communities and tell the people who are living in those communities how proud you are of your priorities. Go and tell a worker whose real wages are going backwards at the fastest rate on record how much you and Gina Rinehart need that $9,000-a-year tax cut. Go and tell the woman in her 60s sleeping on her friend's couch how you can't afford a house for her to live in. Go and tell the person starving on JobSeeker how the weapons manufacturers need public money far more than they do. Go and tell the parents who can't afford to fix their kids' teeth how you can't afford to make it any easier for them to go to the dentist. But you won't, will you? Because you believe in austerity for the poor, in tax cuts for the wealthy and in blank cheques for the military industrial complex.

The fact that both major parties are now supportive of Labor's stage 3 tax cuts for the top end and Labor's $360 billion commitment to nuclear submarines means that you will never criticise each other for those decisions. But I can tell you one thing: the Australian Greens will line up to criticise you, and we will do it every day because we want to be able to look people in the eye and say: 'Actually, we can afford to put dental and mental into Medicare. We can afford to wipe student debt. We can afford to make child care free. We can afford to raise income support.' We should be able to afford to do that because we should not be proceeding with the AUKUS nuclear sub deal and we should not be proceeding with the stage 3 tax cuts. Poverty is a political choice, and it's being made by the major political parties in this place every day.

Question agreed to.